Punderings

I got a refreshingly direct and honest phishing spam email today; in fact the only real complaint I have about it is how confusingly it’s written. It simply asks you to send them your username and password. No tricks, no fancy hidden links or disguised graphics. Just a plain old request for your password via email.

Dear Webmail User,
This message was sent automatically by a program on Webmail …
Your mailbox has exceeded the storage limit set by your administrator. …

To help us re-set your SPACE on our database prior to maintain your INBOX,you must contact your system administrator by replying this e-mail and enter your: Current Username: { } and PW: { } to increase your storage limit.
…
Thank you for your cooperation.

The best thing is: what username and password? They don’t even know what email system you think you use! I suppose I’d have to guess they’re targeting hotmail users for storing dictionaries of user/password word frequencies, since the only two links are to hotmail and live.com.

The mail came from Rubinoc@arcadia.edu apparently at BISHOP.arcadia.edu for those curious.

(tw?-dik?sh?n) n: the compulsion to continually check your twitter stream, and respond to as many posts as you can.


if call(type = incoming) then
if not Find(call.number, my.contacts) then
hits = url.load(whocallsme / 800notes, ?call.number).count
if hits then
call.redirect(voicemail)


Copyright (C) 2009 Shane Curcuru, All Rights Reserved, All Ideas Interesting.

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.
I’m half crazy all for the love of you.
It won’t be a stylish marriage, I can’t afford a carriage.
But you’ll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.

With Google’s new CADIE technology improving search results even more today, I’m surprised that more people haven’t figured out there are now new ways to improve your search results. For example, I don’t even need to mention names to get more search hits, since it’s obvious who CADIE might want to meet.

More importantly: I hope to update my commenting system to take advantage of Autopilot so that I can keep the conversation going with all of my readers.

Separately, Opera’s new Face Gestures is worth a second look.

As reported everywhere by now, rumors show IBM is considering buying the Sun whole. I’m not sure where they’re going to put it, although IBM Research does some really cool stuff, and might have built a contained black hole by now.

Seriously, though, if the rumors pan out, the important questions remain:

• What would this mean to the ASF’s open letter and Sun’s contractual disregard of the rules of the JCP?
• Which ASF projects would consider merging because of committer employer overlaps? Similarly: any Incubator Podlings that would then fail the diversity test?
• Would the Sunny IBM step up to sponsor ApacheCon? Sun was historically a strong supporter of ApacheCon in the past; perhaps with the combined might they’d be a supporter again.
• Would the shiny but empty Sun Burlington campus get new life? Or would any remaining employees be sucked into IBM’s new Littleton campus? How large a local MA employer would the combined company be?

Articles worth reading:

• WSJ – just the facts, m’am
• ZDNet – positive commentary
• ZDNet – negative commentary
• Geir – adding religion to the mix

Disclaimer: I work for one of the corporations named above; all Punderings are solely my own content, unrelated to any employment affiliations.

It astounds me that there’s a lengthy NYT article on Hadoop – clearly with plenty of research, given the different companies and people involved – about an Apache project that never once mentions the ASF or includes the word “Apache” in it.

I sure wish the NYT technology writers would learn how to appropriately refer to ASF projects, just like any other company’s trademarked names, and call it “Apache Hadoop” at least once.

Sigh. Guess I’ll need to work with the PRC (and find time around ApacheCon) to finish writing and finalizing the ASF’s trademark attribution guidelines sooner rather than later.

Hey – congrats to Hadoop on scoring prime coverage. Did anyone check the logs to see if you got a lot of new downloads or server hits today? Oh, wait – the article doesn’t link to the project at all. Ooops!

I just had a couple of brainstorms for really witty t-shirts – where should I get them printed? I have my ASFSwag CafePress store, although they’re expensive and not good for bulk orders. When I have time – probably over ApacheCon – I’ll setup at least basic stores on Zazzle as well, to give people the option.

But for bulk orders – the occasional funny shirt or community message that I want to spread around – where I’m willing to front some money for shirts – where do people go? Whurley pointed me to the seemingly excellent Sanctuary Printshop, but being in Texas is not so good for quick delivery of a big box of 50 shirts. Anyplace local? (Where local is defined as inside of 495).

Oh, and I have a new blog: in case you don’t read me on the upgraded Planet Apache, you should go see Community Over Code as well for thoughts about community, and especially about ApacheCon Europe 2009.

.. how many new twitter followers have you gained today after your beautiful essay about not using Twitter?